THE FOUR MILLION

The Four Million, a collection of twenty-five short stories by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862–1910), appeared in 1906 to largely laudatory reviews in the Atlantic Monthly, the Critic, the New York Times, and the Independent, among other publications. It contains three of O. Henry's most famous stories, "The Gift of the Magi," "The Cop and the Anthem," and "The Furnished Room." The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock concluded that O. Henry was one of the first true literary artists to achieve commercial success. O. Henry was called a "born storyteller" and was praised as "the American Maupassant." In addition to the famous French short story writer Guy de Maupassant, reviewers frequently compared him to Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens. In addition, he also enjoyed some vogue in Europe. The French and Russians, in particular, admired his plots' tightness, crisp proportions, and neutral moral stance. This collection launched O. Henry's serious career as a writer and, some say, his reputation as a true American literary artist. Either way, nearly five million books were sold by the 1920s.

The stories in The Four Million were set in New York City. This caused reviewers and critics alike to label O. Henry a "regionalist" or " local colorist." In East Side tenements, in Wall Street offices, or along Fifth Avenue, his readers recognized their city and loved the stories. The novelist Frank Norris once told him that "there are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'—New York, of course, New Orleans, and best of the lot, San Francisco." But in his well-known story "A Municipal Report," from Strictly Business (1910), O. Henry replied: "It is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and say: 'in this town there can be no romance—what could happen here?' Yes, it is a bold and rash deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance, and Rand and McNally" (p. 148).

The title of the book refers to the 1900 census, which counted four million residents in New York City. O. Henry writes, "Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only 'Four Hundred' people in New York City who were worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen—the census taker" (p. 149). The "four hundred" was the group of New York socialites, membership to which was limited by old money and the size of Mrs. Astor's ballroom.

Two major questions about O. Henry and his work have never been settled to anyone's satisfaction, and opinion seems to be almost evenly balanced. One question is whether he is a true American artist or merely a literary populist. The second question is whether he was guilty of the embezzlement that purportedly occurred while he was working at the First National Bank of Austin in Texas. O. Henry consistently claimed innocence, although he was convicted and served three of five years in prison. Shame about this episode caused him to create his pseudonym and to keep the incident a deep secret, but his imprisonment probably did more than anything else to create O. Henry the writer. Upon his arrival at the federal penitentiary in Ohio, he was asked his occupation and at first answered "newspaper reporter," then added as an afterthought that he was also a registered pharmacist. Consequently, he found himself assigned to the night shift in the pharmacy, which provided ample quiet writing time. While he was in prison, he met a few of the scoundrels and scalawags featured in his tales.

COMPOSITION AND STYLE

O. Henry deliberately wrote for an audience of the "subway-riding masse" (O'Connor, p. 164). He wanted to appeal to a solid democratic public that enjoyed recognizing itself in its stories, and critics have been divided about whether he set out to satirize capitalism or whether he accepted it dispassionately. In marked contrast to Edith Wharton's conception of "Old New York" society, O. Henry wrote about the "little people" living in a colorful urban world, and he felt he could type the entire population of lower class immigrants, especially the Irish, which would account for his underdeveloped, cartoonlike characterizations. Yet he treated his characters with sympathy, wit, irony, and humanity.

WORKING METHODS

O. Henry wrote fast, once producing more than one hundred short stories in two years. He was prone to using long words and long sentences but was most exceptionally observant of detail. For example, one of his most famous stories from The Four Million, "The Furnished Room," includes a description that uses a sailing metaphor:

The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck. (P. 243)

O. Henry's somewhat leisurely style wasted no words, yet he claimed never to edit or rewrite. He took a distant narrative stance from his main characters, who are cleverly but not deeply drawn—usually shopgirls, derelicts, vagabonds, and the working poor. He exposes the cruel, rough side of the social fabric while at the same time giving readers a quaint, romantic glimpse of the more golden side of human nature. One secret of his popularity was that his stories were fun and people looked forward to his famous surprise endings—the "O. Henry twist"—motivation for which might be found in the text, albeit well hidden. Those who find such conclusions cheating call them "trick endings," complaining of empty puns, paradoxes, and abuse of coincidence. Fully aware of the controversy over his conclusions, O. Henry remarks in Cabbages and Kings that "the art of narrative consists in concealing from your audience everything it wants to know until after you expose your favorite opinions on topics foreign to the subject" (p. 92).

Karen Charmaine Blansfield calls his plot structure a "cross pattern" having three subpatterns: cross-purposes, crossed paths, and cross-identities. The plot's central problem—often financial—demands actions by both characters, who will reunite at the close of the story. The two characters work simultaneously to solve some problem, each one unaware of the other's efforts. When they unite at the end and each discovers the other's strategy, it turns out that one person's efforts have affected the other's, with the result often being that they cancel each other out. Unwittingly, the characters have been working at cross-purposes. For example, in the most famous short story from The Four Million, "The Gift of the Magi," the newlyweds Della and Jim sell what little they have to buy each other Christmas presents. The twist is that Jim has sold his treasured pocket watch to buy Della a tortoiseshell comb for her hair, and Della has sold her long hair to buy Jim a chain for his pocket watch.

O. Henry's genre borders on the tall tale; his plots include mistaken identity, coincidence, fate, and separated lovers and feature colloquial New York dialect and slang that has been comically distorted for effect. However, the slang is sometimes obscure for readers not of O. Henry's time. He enjoyed displaying his extensive literary facility through parodies, irony, and twists on authorial quotations. In addition, he had a strong appreciation for the absurd and apparently learned the inverted axiom from Mark Twain. There is some debate about whether he had a sense of the naturalism that was being employed at the time by writers such as Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser. Morality was a social concern at the turn of the twentieth century, and some critics faulted O. Henry's stories as immoral because they sympathized with scamps and rogues, safecrackers, confidence men, and other outlaws—yet they never included anything the least bit risqué. People also criticized him for crude philosophies and lack of high ideals, trite and dated plots, and complacent approval of the status quo. In much of his work he editorializes, making the audience aware of his presence as author-raconteur by apparently randomly discussing, for instance, how to write or by alluding to various literary works.

O. Henry was known as a hard-drinking night owl who rattled off stories in an easy manner. According to one of his biographers, Richard O'Connor, O. Henry found it easier to procrastinate than to write, and his working methods were eccentric at best. Under self-imposed pressure, he was said to invent a title and then write a story for it overnight. "The Gift of the Magi" was overdue for the center section of the World's Christmas issue, which was to be in color—a difficult process that required the illustrations to be drawn in advance. The frantic illustrator, Dan Smith, not having heard from O. Henry, finally tracked him down at his apartment to find that not only had O. Henry not written the story but he had no glimmer of an idea for it. Smith protested again that he must turn in an illustration immediately. Finally, O. Henry told him to draw a room,

the kind you find in a boarding house or rooming house over on the West Side. In the room there is only a chair or two, a chest of drawers, a bed, and a trunk. On the bed, a man and a girl are sitting side by side. They are talking about Christmas. The man has a watch fob in his hand. He is playing with it while thinking. The girl's principal feature is the long beautiful hair that is hanging down her back. That's all I can think of now. But the story is coming. (Bloom, p. 23)

Altogether, O. Henry's stories have elicited contradictory opinions. They were trite and dated with trick endings, or they were clever and contemporary with surprise endings. He had a sentimental love of the little people, or he had a detached democratic attitude. Grim or lovely, either way, his stories were tightly written with linear plots, observant of detail, with an ear for dialogue. Whatever the verdict, people find them fun, and at the turn of the twentieth century O. Henry did more to popularize the short story as a form than anyone since Edgar Allan Poe.

See alsoNew York; Short Story

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Henry, O. Cabbages and Kings. New York: Doubleday Page, 1904.

Henry, O. The Four Million. New York: Doubleday Page, 1904; A. L. Burt, 1906.

Henry, O. Strictly Business. New York: Doubleday Page, 1915.

Secondary Works

Bates, H. E. "American Writers after Poe." In The ModernShort Story. 1941. Boston: Writers, 1956.

Blansfield, Karen Charmaine. Cheap Rooms and RestlessHearts: A Study of Formula in the Urban Tales of William Sydney Porter. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988.

Bloom, Harold, ed. O. Henry. Bloom's Major Short Story Writers. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1999.

Boyd, David. "O. Henry's Road of Destiny." Americana 31 (1953): 579–608.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. "An Interpretation of 'A Furnished Room.'" In their Understanding Fiction. New York: F. S. Crofts, 1943.

Current-García, Eugene. O. Henry (William Sydney Porter). New York: Twayne, 1965.

Éjxenbaum, B. M. O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story. Translated by I. R. Titunik. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968.

Hicks, Granville. "A Sleight-of-Hand Master." New YorkTimes Book Review 12, no. 2 (1956): 6.

Leacock, Stephen. "O. Henry and His Critics." NewRepublic 9 (1916): 120–122.

Long, E. Hudson. O. Henry: The Man and His Work. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949.

Moyle, Seth. My Friend O. Henry. New York: H. K. Flag, 1914.

Narcy, Raoul. "O. Henry through French Eyes." Living Age 303 (1919): 86–88.

O'Connor, Richard. O. Henry: The Legendary Life ofWilliam S. Porter. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970.

Ostrosky, Martin B. "O. Henry's Use of Stereotypes. New York City Stories: An Example of the Utilization of Folklore in Literature." New York Folklore 7 (1981): 41–64.

Patee, Fred Lewis. "The Journalization of American Literature." Unpopular Review 7 (1917): 374–394.

Pavese, Cesare. O. Henry; or, The Literary. Translated by Edwin Fussell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

Peel, Donald F. A Critical Study of the Short Stories of O.Henry. Maryville: Northwest Missouri State College, 25, no. 4 (1961): 3–24.

Prichart, V. S. "O. Henry." New Statesman 54, no. 1393 (1957): 97–98.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. "The Journalists." In his AmericanFiction: American History and Critical Survey. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956.

Review of The Four Million. The Independent. Quoted in Book Review Digest 65, no. 552 (1908): 3.

Review of The Four Million. Public Opinion. Quoted in BookReview Digest II (1907): 152.

Smith, C. Alphonso. O. Henry Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1916.

Steger, Harry Payton. "O. Henry: New Facts about the Great Author." Cosmopolitan 53 (1912): 655–663.

Steger, Harry Payton. "O. Henry: Who He Is and How He Works." World's Work 18, no. 2 (1909): 11724–11726.

Stuart, David. O. Henry. Chelsea, Mich.: Scarborough House, 1990.

Van Doren, Carl. "O. Henry." Texas Review 2 (1917): 248–259.

Van Doren, Carl, and Mark Van Doren. "Prose Fiction." In their American British Fiction since 1890. New York: D. Appleton–Century, 1939.

Voss, Arthur. "The Rise of the Journalistic Short Story: O. Henry and His Predecessors." In The American Short Story: A Critical Survey. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973.

Williams, William Wash. The Quiet Lodger of Irving Place. New York: Dutton, 1936.

Helen Killoran